A FILM festival on the Black Isle has inspired the community to build their own permanent cinema.

The small-scale Cromarty Film Festival, which will run from December 6-8, is now so popular that the town is booked out for the occasion, with celebrity guests like broadcaster Jon Snow returning because they enjoy it so much.

“We have people coming from New York and London – it’s quite bizarre when people come from around the world,” said Dave Newman who founded the festival along with Don Coutts, producer of the Katie Morag TV series.

“It fills the B&Bs and hotels for three days. People just love it and it gives a huge boost before Christmas to a small rural town.”

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This year the guests include best-selling author Denise Mina, journalist Lesley Riddoch, sound engineer Stuart Wilson and directors Zara Balfour and Vicki Lesley.

What makes the festival unique is that the celebrity guests are asked to choose their favourite films and the event is built round their choices.

“It’s a very different way of doing a film festival and it just took off,” said Newman. “Before we knew it, we had people wanting to come and talk about their film in front of a very small audience.”

He said some interesting and unexpected choices had been made over the years. The late Tony Benn chose rom-com Love Actually while Hollywood producer Iain Smith, whose credits include the Mad Max films, chose Airplane.

“You just don’t expect what people are going to come up with,” said Newman.

This year Mina will discuss the enduring appeal of Charles Laughton’s 1950s expressionist thriller The Night Of The Hunter and Riddoch will introduce her favourite film, The Long Kiss Goodnight. She will also host a screening of her own recent film Faroe Islands –The Connected Nations, part of the Nation trilogy of films. The event includes a bonus screening of Shutdown, documenting Greenpeace’s daring occupation of a Transocean rig off the shore of Cromarty this summer.

Oscar and BAFTA-nominated sound recordist Stuart Wilson – who has worked with the likes of Martin Scorcese and Wes Anderson, and created sound for Skyfall and all the recent Star Wars films – will introduce Oscar-winning The Constant Gardener and will talk about the challenges and rewards of shooting on location in Africa.

The festival opens as always with an outdoor screening on the side of Cromarty Lighthouse.

“It goes on whether it’s raining or snowing and we still get hundreds of people turning out – they do get a small dram,” said Newman.

Other venues include a former beachside slaughterhouse turned coffee shop, an old buoy store and a local resident’s living room, which sells out every year.

The decision to build a permanent cinema grew out of the residents’ enthusiasm for the film festival and the monthly film society.

“At first we thought about a container cinema as these are popping up around the world but we realised we needed something bigger,” said Newman. “We then looked at buildings around the town but it was going to be too expensive to convert them so in the end we decided to raise money for a purpose-built, state-of-the-art cinema with 35 seats and surround sound. We looked very carefully at our potential audience size and decided if we built it any bigger the costs would go up dramatically.”

“We have an audience that really enjoys film and that feeling of laughing and crying together and that can get lost in a big cinema in any case.”

The first screening at the £275,000 cinema will be at the end of January. The money has been raised from different funding sources including EU Leader funding.

“We raised a bit extra by selling seats in the cinema so people can have their names on them and stars which will go up in the building,” said Newman.

Newman says other towns around the country are now interested in what is being achieved in Cromarty.

“Very few brand new cinemas are being built now so there has been quite a bit of interest.”